IxX REPORT 1877. 



different forms of plants and animals must have been the result of a gradual 

 process of development or of derivation one from another, the whole standing 

 connected together in certain causal relations. But in Britain such views, 

 though known and not altogether repulsive to a few, obtained little favour, and, 

 by some strange process of reasoning, were looked upon by the great majority 

 as little short of impious questionings of the supreme power of the Almighty. 

 How different is the position of matters in this respect in our day ! — when 

 the cautious naturalist receives and adopts with the greatest reserve the 

 statement of fixed and permanent specific characters as belonging to the 

 different forms of organized beings, and is fully persuaded of the constant 

 tendency to variation which all species show even in the present condition 

 of the earth, and of the still greater liability to change which must have 

 existed in the earlier periods of its formation — when the belief prevails that, 

 so far from being the direct product of distinct acts of creation, the various 

 forms of plants and animals have been gradually evolved in a slow gradation 

 of increasing complexity — and when it is recognized by a largo majority of 

 naturalists that the explanation of this wonderful relation of connexion 

 between previously existing and later forms is to be found in the constant 

 tendency to variation during development and growth, and the perpetuation 

 of such variations by hereditary transmission through successive generations 

 in the long but incalculable lapse of the earth's natural mutations. These, 

 together with the adaptation^ structure and function to external conditions 

 securing the survival of the fittest, are, as you must all be aware, in their 

 essential features the views now known as Darwinism, first simultaneously 

 brought forward by Wallace and Darwin in 1858, and which, after being 

 more fully elaborated in the works of the latter and ably supported by the 

 former, secured, in the incredibly short space of ten or twelve years, the 

 general approval of a large portion of the scientific world. Opinion has, in 

 fact, now undergone such a change that there are few works on Natural 

 History, whether of a special or more general character, in which the rela- 

 tion the scientific facts bear to the newer doctrines is not carefully indicated ; 

 that, with the general public also, the words " Evolution " and " Develop- 

 ment" have ceased to excite the feelings, amounting almost to horror, which 

 they at first produced in the minds of those to whom they were equally 

 unfamiliar and suspicious ; and that, even in popular literature, illustra- 

 tions are not unfrequently drawn in such terms of Darwinian theory as 

 " struggle for existence," "natural selection," " survival of the fittest," and 

 the like. 



It cannot be doubted that in this country, and partly on the Continent, the 

 influence of authority had much to do with the persistence of the older 

 teleological views ; and, as has been well remarked by Haeckel, one of the 

 ablest and keenest supporters of the modern doctrine, the combined influ- 



